On Tuesday, several popular platforms and portals including X (formerly Twitter) and ChatGPT went offline due to an outage at Cloudflare, a major web services provider.

What does Cloudflare do?

Cloudflare helps websites load faster and protects them from online attacks by acting as a middle layer between users and websites. Its software can block malicious attacks and help route internet traffic so that users are delivered content from servers located closest to them.

The outage follows a similar disruption at Amazon Web Services just last month, which affected Reddit, Snapchat, and Roblox, among others.

Cause of the disruption

According to a Cloudflare spokesperson, a surge in unusual traffic starting around 11:20 am caused some services to experience errors.

“While most traffic for most services continued to flow as normal, there were elevated errors across multiple Cloudflare services,” the spokesperson said.

The company said the root cause was an automatically generated configuration file used to manage threat traffic set off “a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services”.

While the cause of the traffic spike was still under investigation, there was no evidence so far to suggest the outage was a result of an attack or caused by malicious activity, the spokesperson added.

Services and websites affected

Apart from X and ChatGPT, the outage affected other websites and services, including Facebook and Bet365. Even Downdetector, a site used to track online service problems, was unavailable for some time.

According to reports, e-commerce platform Shopify, job search engine Indeed, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, audio streaming service Spotify, and US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social were also impacted.